Christianity
The Essene Quarter of Jerusalem in the Time of Herod
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 17, 1999
Monday, 31 December 2007
The Essene Gate of Jerusalem
Josephus describes three walls that surrounded Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66-70 AD) and refers to a “Gate of the Essenes”.
An excavation to the south west of the city revealed a gateway with three distinct sills, the remains of three gates that had been built on the same spot over several hundred years. Some ceramic sherds from beneath the lowest, and earliest, of the three sills, coming from a sealed-off, undisturbed location, provided a reliable indication of the date of the first gate at the site. This pottery predated 70 AD, the year of the destruction of Jerusalem by the troops of the Roman general Titus, son of emperor Vespasian. This seemed to be the gate Josephus called the Gate of the Essenes.
Adjacent to the Essene gate, on the southeast, are the remains of a tower. On the northwestern side of the tower, at bedrock is a finely hewn rock scarp, nearly 5 feet high. On top of the scarp was a wall built of medium-sized field stones, slightly worked into nearly rectangular shapes. Nearby to the north was the inner face. The wall was nearly 8 feet wide. Additional soundings about 65 feet to the east revealed further sections of the inner face of this wall. Pottery sherds from within the core of the wall, both north and east of the tower, dated from the eighth to seventh century BC. This might have been Hezekiah’s wall mentioned in 2 Chronicles 32:5:
And outside it [the ancient enclosure] he [Hezekiah] built another wall.
There may have been an earlier gate a few hundred meters to the east, since there is a large accumulation of debris there, perhaps corresponding to Jeremiah’s Gate of Sherds, or the Gate of the Potter (Jeremiah 19:2), and the Dung Gate (Nehemiah 3:13).
The Gate of the Essenes was the earliest gate in the wall at this point. To construct the gate, builders made a breach in the existing wall. Then they dug a sewage channel that ran along a street leading from the interior of the city and emptied into the Hinnom Valley, south of Mount Zion. Limestone slabs of fine workmanship cover the channel as it passes beneath the gateway. Only the workmen of Herod the Great were likely to have achieved such stonecutting perfection.
The unit of measurement used at the gate was the Roman foot (11.64 inches). The outer width of the gate is exactly 9 Roman feet (105 inches). A stonemason carved the Roman letters H IIII into this stone pilaster. Since the mason’s mark is in Latin and not in Greek or Hebrew, as one might expect in Jerusalem, and since we know Herod often used Roman engineers, the “H” could stand for Herod, who probably commissioned the construction, though arguably the circumstances better suit Hadrian who built the Temple to Jupiter on this site. H IIII indicates that this was the fourth pilaster section supporting the lintel and arch of the gate. The socket, in which the wings of the gate turned, remains in situ, perfectly round and smooth, suggesting that the bottom of the hinge was made of metal. The Gate of the Essenes was destroyed in 70 AD, when Titus’s Roman legionaries razed Jerusalem. Hadrian perhaps rebuilt it.
Who would have originally built a gate at this unlikely location, on the shoulder of a ravine descending into the Hinnom Valley, atop a hill so steep that the gate could only be reached on foot?
The Essene Quarter of Jerusalem
City gates are often called after locations to which their streets lead. The Damascus Gate leads from Jerusalem to Damascus and The Jaffa Gate to Jaffa, to name two of the gates in the present Old City wall. Sometimes the name indicates the function of the gate. Dung Gate probably served as the exit for garbage. The Gate of the Essenes must have been named after the people who lived there and used the gate to go in and out of Jerusalem.
According to Josephus, the Essenes were one of three major Jewish philosophies. The other two were the Pharisees, who were mostly lay people, and the Sadducees, the aristocratic and powerful priestly class of Jerusalem. Josephus says there were six thousand Pharisees and four thousand Essenes in Judaea. Pharisees were less radical than the Essenes and were ready to compromise with the Sadducees and, to some extent, co-operate with the Romans. The contemporaneous Jewish philosopher and exegete Philo of Alexandria gives the same number of Essenes. Josephus and Philo report that the Essenes live “together in large communities in several cities of Judaea and in many villages”.
Evidence that Essenes lived not only at Qumran, near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, but also in Jerusalem comes from several sources, including the scrolls themselves, assuming the scrolls constitute an Essene library. The famous War Scroll, which describes an apocalyptic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, refers to the sounding of trumpets when the victorious forces of light return from battle against the enemy when they journey to the congregation or community, ha-edah, “in Jerusalem”.
Josephus mentions a certain Essene teacher named Judas living in Jerusalem in 104 BC. Later, Josephus reports, the youthful Herod the Great met an Essene named Menahem.
The nucleus of the Essene movement was made up of Zadokite kohanim, or priests. The Temple’s high priests claimed descent from the house of Zadok, a son of Aaron, in the time of Solomon. The founders of the Essenes apparently claimed the same descent, though they might have called themselves Zadokites because they were the perfect priests of Ezekiel’s perfect Temple.
Anyway, scholars surmise that, after the successful second-century BC revolt of the Maccabees and the re-establishment of an independent Jewish state, the Maccabaean kings, of the Hasmonean family, assumed not only the kingship but also the high priesthood. The king and high priest were one. Some Zadokites considered the non-Zadokite priests usurpers and declared their Temple sacrifices illegal. They joined the Essenes and refused to take part in Hasmonean sacrificial offerings, sticking to far stricter purity rules than those the Temple authorities were enforcing.
Because of the Essenes’ strict purity rules, among other things, sexual intercourse was forbidden in Jerusalem, they will have lived in their own section of the city. The earliest gate on this site, the Gate of the Essenes, therefore led into the Essene quarter of Jerusalem.
Latrines
About 50 Essene kohanim may have lived in the southwestern quarter of Jerusalem between 30 BC and 70 AD. Celibate, the kohanim adhered to purity laws far stricter than those followed by Jerusalem Temple priests. The Gate of the Essenes gave the community access to their ritual baths, or miqva’ot (singular, miqveh) and latrines, which stood outside the city wall.
This conclusion is supported by the discovery of another previously unknown landmark mentioned in Josephus’s description of the First Wall—the place of the Bethso. According to Josephus, the Bethso lay between Hippicus Tower, near the modern Jaffa Gate, and the Gate of the Essenes.
Since the 19th century, most scholars have agreed that the term “Bethso” derives from the Hebrew beth-soa, or latrines. According to the longest Dead Sea Scroll, the Temple Scroll, the Essenes did build such a structure-outside their city, to the northwest-precisely where Josephus locates the Bethso.
The Temple Scroll specifies:
And you shall make them a place for a hand, outside the city, to which they shall go out, to the northwest of the city, [where they shall make] roofed buildings with pits within them, into which the excrement will descend [so that] it will [not] be visible at any distance from the city, three thousand cubits.
The Essene law is evidently a strict interpretation of Deuteronomy 23:13:
There shall be a place for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself.
The route described in the Temple Scroll matches the topographical situation around the Essene quarter. An Essene leaving Jerusalem through the Gate of the Essenes would turn to the northwest and follow the path between the city wall and the ravine descending into the Hinnom Valley and reach his destination at a bend in the wall near the former Bishop Gobat School. Josephus, too, notes that the Essenes selected more retired spots to defecate. The resulting frequent foot traffic through the Gate of the Essenes surely explains why its sills were so well worn.
The remains of the Bethso appear in an 1875 diagram of the scarp of Mount Zion by Palestine Exploration Fund archaeologist Claude R Conder. This drawing shows a platform with two converging sewage channels running parallel to the rock scarp. A military man, Captain Conder suggested that the platform might have been a horse stable that served as a hiding place from which city defenders could ambush enemy attackers. Today, a terrace is built over the platform and only the eastern corner remains visible.
Ritual Baths
The discovery of several miqva’ot or ritual baths just outside the gate further supports the identification of this area as an Essene quarter.
There was a double miqveh about 160 feet from the gate. Originally discovered more than a hundred years ago by Claude Conder, these miqva’ot were just outside the ancient city wall and were situated on top of a rock shelf, from which one could descend 36 steps to a garden, level with the Gate of the Essenes. One of the two baths had a divider between the steps of descent and the steps of ascent, as also appears in the Qumran miqva’ot. Presumably, the steps of ascent were for the purified bather to emerge without recontamination.
That these Jerusalem miqva’ot are outside the wall is significant. Deuteronomy 23:11-12 states that when someone contracts impurity because of a nocturnal emission, and Essene leaders were celibate:
He must go outside the camp; he must not come within the camp. When evening comes, he must wash himself with water. When the sun has set, he may come back into the camp.
The Essenes regarded the entire city of Jerusalem as equivalent to the camp. One scroll reads:
Jerusalem is the camp of holiness.
They must have purified themselves in these miqva’ot before re-entering their quarter of the city. The Essenes interpreted these laws of purity very strictly. The Pharisees regarded purification from a variety of causes as effective immediately upon emergence from the miqveh. But the Essenes insisted on waiting until sunset in strict accordance with the instruction in Deuteronomy.
A small secret entrance to the city via a postern gate barely 4 feet wide was adjacent to the miqva’ot on the rock platform out of which they were carved. Once the sun set, the purified bathers could reenter the Essene quarter quietly and privately.
The rules concerning the ritual water of purity were very strict. Essene miqva’ot required water that no non-Essene had come in contact with. Therefore the water had to originate in the Essene quarter. A small channel hewn in the rock conducted water from the Essene quarter inside the city to the miqva’ot outside the wall, excellent proof that the Essenes lived in this corner of Jerusalem.
In the Greek Garden attached to the Greek Orthodox seminary, were two ancient ritual baths. One has been covered up but the other remains open. Ritual baths are common in excavations all over Jerusalem. Those for families are comparatively small, while those that served the public, like the baths found in the Temple compound, are much larger. These baths were large and comparable with those in Qumran. The one that is still open in the Greek Garden is 35 feet long and nearly 14 feet wide. Not even in Qumran is there such a large miqveh. These miqva’ot were not meant for family use but served a community.
Later Gates on the Site
The middle sill is part of the second gate at the site, which was built directly on the ruins of the Gate of the Essenes. It gives us a glimpse into an obscure period in Jerusalem’s history, the remains of which are very scant and thus highly prized. The pottery scraped out from under this sill belongs to the second to fourth century AD.
This sill consists of two limestone slabs bonded together with cement plaster. Apparently, this second gate had a stepped sill. The lower slab is broken off at a slant, indicating that the gate was made of material gathered at random. In the corner of the lower slab is a rather shapeless hinge socket, indicating that the gate hinge also was not well formed. The socket is more primitive than the one on the earlier gate. The excavators found two coins, one outside and one inside the gate, of the Emperor Heliogabalus (218-222 AD). Repair work may have been done on the gate or the sewage channel during his reign.
After the Romans suppressed the Second Jewish Revolt (132-135 AD), Jews were banned from the city. The Romans rebuilt Jerusalem as their own, renaming it Aelia Capitolina to remove any association with the Jews. They settled primarily in the present-day Old City. The southern end of Mount Zion lay outside Aelia Capitolina.
The middle sill, built directly on top of the Gate of the Essenes, could be part of a gate in a makeshift wall built by Jewish Christians who remained on Mount Zion even though the hill was outside the Roman city. Since they had not taken part in the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, these Jewish Christians were allowed to drift back to Jerusalem after Hadrian’s expulsion of the Jews, especially during the beneficent reign of Antoninus Pius (138-161 AD). In the early third century, the Jewish Christian residents of Mount Zion appear to have erected some kind of a wall around their quarter and their synagogue.
At this time, Mount Zion was rarely visited by gentile Christians, who rather looked down on it. Around it were “cucumber fields”, as observed by several church fathers, such as Eusebius, Epiphanius and Hieronymus. Nevertheless, in 333 AD the anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux visited this area, as noted in his Itinerary, which has survived. He relates that after leaving the Temple area he descended to the Pool of Siloam and then ascended from there, passing through the ruins of the Palace of Caiaphas, to Mount Zion.
Inside, within the wall of Sion appears the site, where David had his palace. And of the seven synagogues which had been there just a single one remains, while all the others have been plowed and tilled, just as the prophet Isaiah had said [Isaiah 1:81]. When from there you go out of the wall of Sion, those proceeding to the Neapolitan Gate [Damascus Gate] have to their right side, towards the valley, the walls of the Praetorium of Pontius Pilate and to their left the hill of Golgotha.
He seems to have entered Mount Zion through the Essene gate and left it through another one.
The crudely worked middle sill was part of an entrance in this primitive “Wall of Sion”, which surrounded an impoverished community of Jewish Christians shunned by other Christians as heretics because they refused to accept the doctrinal decision of the Council of Nicea (325 AD).
The uppermost sill was dated to the mid-Byzantine period (324-636 AD), when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and Christians ruled Jerusalem, except briefly during the seventh-century AD Persian invasion. The Byzantine construction—or reconstruction—of the gate is dearly indicated by the use of the Byzantine foot (12.2 inches). The width of the gate at its inner side is 10 Byzantine feet (122 inches) and at its outer side 8 Byzantine feet (97 inches).
The most likely time for the construction of the uppermost gate was when the Byzantine empress Eudocia lived in Jerusalem, from 444 to 460 AD. Eudocia built several churches and began to reconstruct the city walls of Jerusalem so that they encompassed Mount Zion once again. The gate was part of a southern enclosure that surrounded some of these churches, the Siloam Pool and Mount Zion. Apparently, Eudocia intended to rebuild the walls the way she thought they had been at the time of Jesus. Fortunately for archaeologists, her wall was more cosmetic than protective. Her engineers did not bother to lay deep foundations but built on top of the ancient walls they found. So the sills of the Gate of the Essenes and the Roman-period gate in the “Wall of Sion” were preserved.
While the earlier two gates could only be reached by a steep ascent from the Hinnom Valley, Eudocia’s engineers built a road around Mount Zion, gently descending to the so-called Sultan’s Pool, west of Mount Zion, and leading from there to Bethlehem. It was thus much easier for the wave of pilgrims coming from the south to enter Jerusalem. An illustrated report of the excavation of the Essene Gate, which extended over ten years, can be found on the net in Biblical Archaeology Review.
A Day in the Life of an Essene under Herod
M Broshin has reconstructed the life of an Essene leader in Herod’s time when the Essenes were in favour. As the palace was so near the Essene quarter, the royal court was easily accessible to the Essene Nasi. With the temple reconstruction going on just across the valley to the east, the Essenes would be up before dawn to greet the sunrise with hymns. So, they would go to the “House of Prostration”, their assembly hall high in the city to catch the first rays of the sun as they sang their morning benedictions. Thereafter, the Essene builders would head towards the temple where they were essential to the building and fitting out of the Holy Places which could not be polluted by any profane hand. Their leaders would look to their other duties, and the Prince would head to Herod’s palace for the day’s business. Josephus described Herod’s palace in his Jewish books.
After the morning reports and councils, the Prince would return to the Essene quarter for his ritual bath, and would don a fresh linen garment, would eat and then pursue Essene business. In the evening, he would take part in the final meal of the day, in the role of messiah, conducted by a presiding priest. Everyone would have a piece of bread and a bowl of vegetables, as we know from Josephus and the Scrolls which also describes the ritual of the priest and messiah blessing the bread and beginning to eat before the others could. The food was eaten in silence and grace said at the end. Finally, the priest blessed the messiah. All the Essenes were priests so who is the priest at such a gathering? Perhaps the messiah took both roles as the senior man present, though the implication is that a senior priest was a titular head of the community, the Nasi being the executive head. When the head priest was about his business elsewhere, the two roles of priest and messiah were probably combined in the person of the Nasi. Then the Nasi was the senior man and priest present, and he was also the earthly messiah. It is likely to have been the case in the gospels, Jesus taking both roles because the titular head was John the Baptist who was imprisoned. The blessing of the messiah is:
With your sceptre may you devastate the land, and by the breath of your lips may you kill the wicked one… May He make your horns iron and your hooves bronze… for God raised you up as a rod for the rulers and He shall strengthen you with His Holy name…1QSa
Interesting here, in the light of later Christian heresy such as witchcraft, is that the messiah is pictured with horns and hooves! Moreover he has God’s holy name, making him sound yet more like the Christian notion of the messiah—an aspect of God Himself. The Nasi, the aspiring earthly messiah, blesses his heavenly spirit, the angel Michael, who will enter him at the End of Days, the period preceding the Day of God’s Vengeance. The messiah would lead the righteous against the forces of the Wicked One, at this time, a personification of the Roman occupiers of Judaea. The king of the Romans was called the Evil King, or the King of the Kittim, Romans being identified with the Kittim, an older name for people from the Mediterranean, formerly mainly Greeks.
Essenes were expecting an eschatological war with the Romans (1QM 15:2), and the War Scroll was their impression of how it would be conducted. It would be a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. Of course, all of this was laesae majestatis—treason—to the Romans and merited a cruel execution. Herod was not a Roman but he was a Roman client king and obliged to impose the same punishment or risk being accused himself of treason. Essenes therefore had to conduct their internal business in the utmost of secrecy, and were sworn to secrecy by a binding oath when they were admitted, as Josephus explained. Knowing that they might be caught, especially in the last days, they inured themselves to torture in case Herod or the Romans were somehow to get a hold of them.
